Same here. I'm not getting that overwhelming desire to run home and play more. The combat just does not feel satisfying. I understand it's early and things get more interesting later, but after playing Horizon, Nier, and even FF15, this game just lacks weight and satisfying results in its early combat. It feels like playing whack-a-mole with a laser pointer.The combat is very mass effecty though, at least I think so. So that's great and with the added jet boost I like it even better. But yeah horizon is league above in combat. I agree with the graphics. Everything in the ark and nexus looks off for some reason. The first planet looks great though. Some of the skin on some NPC's look devoid of any sort of extra detail and specular. Some just look like flat diffuse faces. I'm not far and just got to the nexus so not sure if I've been through the part in the story you are talking about. So far I'm intrigued by the new aliens and the tech. We shall see once i get farther.
Visuals are all over the dang place. In some moments they are brilliant. In others I just can't help but wonder how they managed to screw up that badly. So many faces are not just devoid of emotion but for crud's sake the lack of certain textures compared to my character makes me feel like I'm a lone human in a universe full of Barbie and Ken dolls.
The banter between me and my squadmates is awesome and I'm liking the more important characters. However, the overall writing so far just leaves me stunned. Not in a good way. I can't say anything without spoiling but I will give one example. It's shoddy writing to force a situation to be even more dramatic by making highly intelligent people be incredibly wasteful of resources long before they knew more were on the way and when they already discovered trouble.
I do think if you like Mass Effect you will like the game. I just wish it didn't go towards the open world environments and was more like ME 2 and 3.